THREE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, 19th and 20th CENTURY STEREOVIEWS WILL BE PRIZED POSSESSIONS

eBay appears to have become the premier world marketplace for antique 3-D images -- typically, more than 2000 lots can be found for sale here any day you look, ranging from single images to sets of 100 or more.

Of all the artifacts of the 19th and 20th centuries, I'm betting that stereoviews (also known as stereo views, 3-D views, stereopticon cards, stereoscope views, and others) will be highly valued long after all sound recordings and even other photographic formats. Already, some scarce stereoscopic images (closeups of famous people, views of dirigibles, etc) can command $100 and more, each. But plenty of very interesting views are available for $5 each -- and often much less than that, when purchased in bulk.

Not everyone realizes that Keystone and Underwood & Underwood stereoviews (among others) are real-photo prints made one at a time from original large-format glass negatives which, in turn, had very-fine-grain emulsions. Besides the excitement of 3-D, such stereoviews contain enormous detail. Photos of Lincoln and the Civil War that you see in history books, such as those by Matthew Brady, are often just one half of a stereo pair.

Between 1880 and 1940, especially, stereographers captured images of workplaces, cityscapes, famous people, early machinery, and remote locations that have long ago disappeared.

Many towns had a local stereographer who recorded people and events, especially between 1850 and 1925. My hometown, Bradford PA, had Dettlor and Waddell, who photographed the Kinzua Bridge, at the time the tallest and longest railway trestle in the world. I re-photographed it on Stereo Realist slides almost a century later, just a few years before a tornado destroyed it.

I now live near Decatur, Illinois, whose local stereographer captured a close up of Theodore Roosevelt shortly after he assumed the Presidency, seated on the porch of the home of the Governor of Illlinois. Roosevelt was practically skinny in those days.

When you view these images through a proper stereoscope (like your great grandparents undoubtedly had in their house), the scenes really come alive. You notice detail in ways you never do in 2-D photos, and the detail is so fine that you can easily spend five minutes or more looking at each view.

By the time of WW I, school children often learned about the rest of the world by looking as stereoviews of distant places and unfamiliar industries, prepared for their use by the large Underwood and Underwood and Keystone stereoview companies, which had acquired tens of thousands of views taken by their own and other stereographers. Stereoscope views became so popular in the early decades of the 20th century that rich and poor alike had collections. Large numbers of the views they purchased remain available and are remarkably inexpensive.

Individual stereoviews vary considerably in quality and in condition. Views sold in boxed sets that have remained in their original boxes are often amazingly well preserved since the boxes have kept them from being exposed to fingerprints, dust, fading, etc.

BEGINNING A STEREOVIEW COLLECTION

One good way to begin is to search "stereoview", and sort by highest to lowest price. In less than a week you will have a good feel for the range of views available, prices, condition, etc. Try "stereo view" and "stereopticon" as variants; you might find something that other people are overlooking!

LITHO VIEWS vs. REAL PHOTO STEREOVIEWS

Keystone-type views, as mentioned above, were made one at a time and are real photos mounted on curved 3.5 x 7 inch cards. Much cheaper views were made by lithography -- a printing process that reduces photos to fine dots of ink. Many lithos were colored (often crudely and with little attention to the real colors in the original scene, though some were done carefully and quite convincingly). Most collectors greatly prefer the real photo cards over the lithos. But there are exceptions.

High quality lithos do exist, for example a set made for physicians showing graphic examples of various "skin diseases", including a wide variety of manifestations of syphilis. I own that set; my daughter gets a kick out of the fact that she can count on me to show it to any new boyfriend she brings home.

KEYSTONE TYPE CARD FORMAT vs. OTHER CARD FORMATS

Your grandmother's stereopticon has a slide bar that accommodates the standard U.S. and British format card, which is 7 inches wide (but may be anywhere from 3.5 to 9 inches tall -- the 3.5 being standard, though a slightly taller "cabinet view" was popular before 1900; the very tall cards allowed a detailed explanatory text to appear above a standard 3.5 inch view, such as on the human dissection cards for medical students sold as the Edinburgh anatomy set (1895 or so, through the 1930s).

The Germans developed a smaller format, closer to 2 3/8 x 5 inches (6 x 13 cm.). These "Raumbild" format views include many sets produced during the Nazi era and once thought to be very scarce -- because German and Austrian law very strictly limit their sale within Germany if they contain swastikas or other Nazi symbolism. Sets showing the defeat of Poland and France, 1938 - 1940, are now common because of international sales and their prices have dropped considerably. (The set celebrating the defeat of Russia is much scarcer; please contact me if you happen to come across one.) (joke)

VIEWERS ("STEREOPTICONS") FOR CARD FORMAT STEREOVIEWS

Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with the invention of the standard stereoviewer -- a hooded set of optics attached to a perpendicular bar on which slides a carrier for the view that allows you to push out or pull in the view until it is in optimum focus (a distance that will vary from person to person). The slide carrier is typically a wooden bar with two bent-wire holders rising up from it, 7 inches apart.

Many of the antique Holmes stereoviewers (stereopticons) sold on eBay and in antique shops are not fine optical instruments. Sears, Roebuck and other mass merchandisers sold them for $1 or less at the turn of the 20th century when every household commonly enjoyed stereoviews. Such instruments are often fun to look at, but not much fun to look through. Leave them to those who want a conversation piece on their mantels.

Besides the limitations of their lenses, most viewers made before 1930 have narrow hoods whose width does not allow many of us to wear modern eyeglasses when looking through them. If your astigmatism correction is important to you, you will want a viewer with a wider hood.

The Keystone Model 40 Eye Exercise (or Eye Comfort) viewer has a wider hood that does fit most modern eyeglass frames. Other well-made viewers are available, both antique and modern reproductions. Before buying any stereopticon (stereoviewer), ASK THE SELLER the horizontal inside dimension of the hood and be sure it is wide enough for your glasses frames to fit inside.

TRANSPARENCY FORMATS

Everyone knows about ViewMaster reels, so I will spend little time on them except to say that not everyone realizes that ViewMaster produced some very high quality specialized sets of great interest. One was a pet project of a ViewMaster corporate executive -- a set of views showing a wide variety of rare Chinese artwork, packaged with a Rolls-Royce quality viewer: complete with color corrected light source and achromatic lenses. Another enormous set shows a complete human body dissection in 3-D, probably more useful than any series of flat anatomy images. These views were widely used by medical students in the 1950s and 1960s.

Stereo Realist slides were an amateur format; President Eisenhower and the silent film star Harold Lloyd are among stereographers whose slides have been published in books. Stereo Realist viewers and cameras are readily available on eBay at better prices than we paid in the 1980s in used camera stores. Collections of slides show up regularly; these can prove to be fascinating trips back in time, so real when viewed in a good viewer that they can keep you interested for hours.

Other transparency formats exist, some of them American, some European. Most were commercial, like ViewMaster, and good inventories of travel images and children's entertainment are available.

ADDED JUNE 20, 2006:

DON'T MISS the June 19, 2006, issue of THE NEW YORKER for its article on stereo vision -- illustrated by one of my favorite New York stereoviews -- written by Oliver Sacks (neuropsychologist and author of THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT).

Sacks reports a case in which a woman in her 50s has become able to see in 3-D after not having done so since early childhood (if then), and describes how surprising and thrilling this has been for her. Sacks speaks eloquently to the enormous utility and pleasure that accrue to us from our brain's ability to compare the two images entering our 3"-separated eyes, and, from the comparison, create an instantaneous awareness of depth relationships throughout the scene.

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